IDE for python

[Jonathan Hartley]

On Nov 16, 5:09 am, sturlamolden <sturlamol... at yahoo.no> wrote:
> On 15 Nov, 18:09, Peng Yu <pengyu... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > There had been some discussion on IDE. But I'm not sure what pros and
> > cons of each choice. Current, I'm using vim and ctags.
>
> > Could somebody give some advices on choosing the best IDE for me?
>
> There is a plug-in to develop (amd debug) Python using MS Visual
> Studio. It works with IronPython and CPython.
>
> There is the PyDev plug-in for Eclipse.
>
> There is Komodo from ActiveState.
>
> There is KDevelop in KDE4.
>
> Which is better? I don't know.
>
> My impression is that Python development does noe need an IDE like
> e.g. C++ development do. There is no build process, which takes the
> major advantage of the IDE away. I am fine with a editor like IDLE or
> Kate.


I'd like to offer the group the anecdote of the great Resolver IDE
migration.

Developers at Resolver, where I work, choose their own IDE. Being
developers, that meant every single person chose a different one. We
had them all. Which turned out, slightly unexpectedly, to be just
fine.

We pair on all production code. So this meant we all spent a lot of
time sitting at each other's desks. We soon all became pretty familiar
with each other's environments - there's nothing like 8 hours a day of
hands-on usage, coupled with sitting right next to a bone-fide expert
to get you up to speed pretty quick. I even learned a little Emacs,
holy cow!

Occasionally, after seeing the details of how well some other IDE
worked, developers would switch from one to another.

Then, after about a year, a curious thing happened. One by one, in
entirely independent decisions, almost all developers decided to
migrate to either Emacs or Vi.*

Each person decided that the fancy features of their IDE wasn't as
useful to them as having a flexible, powerful and lightweight editor
which can easily be scripted to provide whatever ad-hoc features they
need.

I regard this as an example of the way pairing spreads knowledge.

* I say 'most developers' - there were two notable exceptions: Michael
Foord, who's prodigious contributions are legend, who likes Wing, and
Will Reade, our tame brainiac, responsible for the exceedingly clever
'IronClad' open-source project, who likes the uncomplicated simplicity
of TextPad.

As far as I can make out, TextPad has only two features, syntax
highlighting and the ability to define a 'make' command, and a regex
that is used to extract filenames and line-numbers from the resulting
output of that make command. These are, it turns out, sufficient to
transform a program that would otherwise simply be 'Notepad' into an
entirely credible development environment.